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In the church there was plenty of opportunity for enriching yourself and giving jobs to friends and relatives.
As the Bible was in Latin, very few people could read it. The church said it was the first and final authority for interpreting the Bible.
But then in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation, there was a heretic who got away. His name was Martin Luther.
All you had to do was to believe, to have faith; faith alone will save you is the central Lutheran message.
good works, to act as Christ says we should act. But those works in themselves will not help you to be saved. This is where Protestant and Catholic teaching differed fundamentally.
The only thing we can do is to believe and if we believe, God has promised that we will be saved.
Luther said, was unnecessary. This view did not go down well in Rome. The pope rejected Luther’s criticisms of the church and his new teaching about salvation. Luther replied with fierce denunciations of the pope.
Who does this man think he is? He is the representative of Christ on earth, so we are told, yet he is really the enemy of Christ, the anti-Christ. He lives in pomp, wears a triple crown, when you come into his presence you have to kiss his toe, when he moves he is carried shoulder-high by his servants — and yet we know from the Bible that Christ went around on foot.
The Protestant Reformation was the movement to reform the church by basing teaching and practice on the Bible.
The message of the Reformation was Christianity is not Roman.
Germany was not one country; it was a collection of many states. Partly because of this the church exercised more influence in Germany than in the unified countries of France and England. It held an immense amount of land, almost half in some places,
By following Luther, the princes were able to seize the church lands, appoint their own bishops and stop the flow of money to Rome.
The Protestant movement kept spinning off new churches because there was no longer a central authority to interpret the Bible and police belief.
For over a hundred years Catholics and Protestants fought each other, literally fought each other, in wars.
It was better that a Catholic or a Protestant be killed than that they preach a doctrine which was absolutely offensive to God and damaging to his church on earth.
The Renaissance was looking backwards to Greek and Roman learning. The Protestant reformers were looking backwards to the Christian church before it assumed its Roman structure.
We now have to look at the process by which European culture became forward-looking; how it came to believe in progress, that things over time will get better, which is a very odd thing to believe. The belief in progress came about as a result of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. This is the period when our modern science begins.
The earth is the impure realm; on earth things change and decay but the heavens are a pure, perfect, unchanging realm.
Why do the planets go in circles? Because the circle is a perfect form.
All bodies are attracting each other: this book is being attracted to the earth, the moon is attracted to the earth, the earth is attracted to the sun. The water on the earth is pulled up and down in tides because of the changing force of attraction between earth and moon. It is the one system which holds all matter together. We can now determine why the planets move as they do.
maths is at the centre of science and that the Greek hunch turned out to be true: the world is simple and the laws governing it will be mathematical in form.
The message of the Scientific Revolution was the Greeks were wrong. The great reverence for the classics was broken. We have done better than equal them; we have surpassed them.
This is a common Western predicament; we are very clever but we keep discovering we are insignificant.
We are not at the centre of the universe, we are not a special creation, we are descended from the animal kingdom by a system of chance happenings.
This desire to make reason sovereign is what animated the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement of the eighteenth century which aimed to apply reason to the reshaping of society, to government, to morality, to theology.
One of the men of the Enlightenment summed up its program in this way: ‘I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest.’
Admittedly that was an extreme view. The Enlightenment was not a revolutionary movement; it was not even a political movement. It was a collection of scholars, writers, artists and historians who believed that as reason and education spread, superstition and ignorance would fall away and people would cease to believe in such nonsense as miracles or kings ruling by God’s permission.
This was a radical encyclopedia because it applied reason to everything and it gave no hierarchy within knowledge. It did not start, as the church would like, with theology and God. Where do you find God in this encyclopedia? Under D (for Dieu) and R (for Religion). This is an alphabetical index to knowledge, and that very act of making it alphabetical was a defiance of the church and its claims to possess the highest truths.
‘The manner of adoring the true God ought never to deviate from reason, because God is the author of reason …’
The message of the Enlightenment was that religion is superstition. So religion, which was once central to European civilisation, must be sidelined. Reason will take its place. If we follow reason and science then there will be progress.
The Romantic movement believed in feelings, emotions, all the passions. In this it was directly contrary to the Enlightenment, which put its faith in reason.
We are shaped, said the Romantics, by our language and our history;
Our modern interest and respect for culture begins at this point, when intellectuals first began collecting folk culture.
The message of Romanticism was that civilisation is artificial; that it cramps and constrains us. It is within traditional culture that life is fully lived.
The twin forces of science and progress on the one hand and emotion and liberation on the other are still very strong.
It is our fate to be torn, divided and confused. Other civilisations have a single tradition and not this odd threesome. They are not so liable to the turmoil, overturnings and confusion that we have had in our moral and intellectual life. We come from a very mixed parentage and there is no place we can call home.
The three great philosophers of Athens — Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — are still great forces in philosophy. It has been said that all Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. The three men were intimately connected. Plato recorded the words of Socrates, who conducted philosophy as a discussion with his companions; Aristotle was Plato’s pupil.
Socrates believed that if your mind was clear and sharp, you could reach the truth. You didn’t have to seek it out or conduct research. The truth exists; you have to cultivate your mind to grasp it.
Wherever I am, said Socrates, I cannot live without questioning: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’
Why scramble, he asked, to hold onto life if I can’t live forever? The aim is not to live, but to live well. I have had a good life under the laws of Athens and I am ready to accept my penalty.
The bias in our culture is for Socrates. It has not always been so, but Plato’s account of his death has survived to make him the patron saint of questioning.
Until recently, medical students took an oath that he developed and which bore his name: the Hippocratic oath.
The most complete compendium of Roman law was assembled in the sixth century AD by the order of Emperor Justinian, who ruled the Eastern Empire, which had survived the assault of the Germans. Justinian’s Code, when it was rediscovered in the eleventh century, was immensely influential.
The German invasion of the Roman Empire was the first of three great invasions. Following the Germans came the Muslims and then the Norsemen or Vikings. After years of turmoil, European society stabilised and then itself began expanding — in crusades to the Holy Land, to drive the Muslims from Spain, and then by sea to lay claim to the world’s treasures.
We speak of the fall of the Roman Empire and we give it a date: 476 AD. But only the western half of the empire fell at this time. The eastern, Greek-speaking half survived for another 1000 years with Constantinople as its capital.
German invaders and the Roman Empire.
For the western empire, ‘fall’ gives a misleading picture — and so does a single date. There wasn’t a massing of barbarians on the borders, a steady advance southwards, the Romans retreating, a last-ditch stand at Rome. It wasn’t like that at all. This was a rather unusual invasion.
The Germans had no desire to take over the empire; they were invaders who did not intend to be conquerors.
The emperors, of course, did not want them marauding through their territories. They sent forth armies to defeat or eject the invaders; only occasionally were they successful. Usually the end point was that the Germans remained in more or less independent enclaves. Finally there was very little left in the emperor’s control. The Germans thought nevertheless that there should be an emperor. For a long time the invaders of Italy propped up a Roman as emperor. Finally one German general called an end to this farce. Instead of propping up puppets, he decided to rule openly himself.
